Skip to main content

You are not logged in. Your edit will be placed in a queue until it is peer reviewed.

We welcome edits that make the post easier to understand and more valuable for readers. Because community members review edits, please try to make the post substantially better than how you found it, for example, by fixing grammar or adding additional resources and hyperlinks.

Required fields*

7
  • Nominated to reopen. Yes, there is some subjectivity in there, but there are certainly reasonable things to say why info did not take off as a default Unix documentation format. Though I'm no expert on the topic. Commented Oct 7, 2014 at 17:52
  • 2
    For what it's worth, man existed since the dawn of time -- i.e., the mid 1970s. AFAIK help is quite a bit more recent that that. Commented Oct 7, 2014 at 18:19
  • 2
    While there are objective things to say about man vs info, to get to the question's "why," you have to apply opinion. Is verbosity actually better? Is it better to have a bunch of hyperlinked documentation sections or one big document? Etc. The OP obviously believes info is better, but I like man better. That's enough to prove we're in the land of opinion. Commented Oct 7, 2014 at 18:26
  • 2
    Your other query is 100% off topic since it can only be pure opinion and speculation. IMO your initial query is also off topic for the same reasons. I also dislike info since I never remember all the tricks of moving around in it. If you're going to have something that complex, why not use HTML and a browser? But that too is an opinion, I don't see how you can get a definite answer to this. Commented Oct 8, 2014 at 11:47
  • 6
    @terdon Hello, this is 1986, the GNU project has published Info as an improvement on manual pages — you can print an Info manual, or browse it on the computer and follow links to different sections, which is pretty neat. What is this “HTML and a browser” that you speak of? Commented Oct 8, 2014 at 20:57